The Uber Unity 3D UI Essentials Launch

Just in time for February, my latest title Unity 3D UI Essentials, has now burst forward on to all leading bookstores, in both electronic and print formats (whichever takes your fancy). It has certainly been a fun and wild ride producing this unique title. A title that takes the new Unity UI system for a wild ride and brings along it’s pals, such as the new Unity EventSystem and of course its best friend Open Source code. (See the product page for the title for more info)

*Note, the Unity 3D UI Essentials launch party is now Finished and the winners have been notified.
Shall follow up with a result post once the winners accept.

It follows on from the hugely successfully title Mastering Unity 2D Game Development which was released late last year. In fact if you have been following me closely, you’ll know that I’ve actually been writing books constantly (first M2D for a year and now this title) for over a year and a half now (not something I recommend if you like your sanity).

In celebration for this launch I have been working hard behind the scenes, twisting arms and generally chasing down all my favours to bring you an amazing deal.

Time for a party!

Here’s what is on offer for a lucky few (not that few) people to win as part of my launch celebrations:

And that’s just what we have so far, I’m still on the lookout for additional UI themed prizes to add to the list

(If you are interested in contributing to the promotion, just use the Contact form on the blog)

The important stuff – How to enter

In following with a number of competitions around the web, you simply need to do any of the following for a single entry in to the competition:

Comment on this blog post

I use Disqus for comments, so your details are safe. No details about you are stored on this blog. Just be sure to use an email I can contact you with after the competition for your prizes. See the Terms and conditions for the competition for more details.

Entries to be in no later than Sunday 22nd February 2015

For full details about the book, please check out my product page which also include the purchase links for the book.

If you wondering why you should buy the book, I was recently asked this very question:

“Why your book over any other resource? Still learning Unity, and literally reading everything I can find about it, but with the crazy amount of free content available on youtube about the 4.6 update content, why would I pay x (I would assume 30-40)$ for your book instead of just watching a couple of videos? This isn’t meant to be taken as an attack, just legitimately curious about what your book brings to the table.”

In response I simply stated:

This book (like my last) is a learning exercise to teach you not just how to make UI but to understand what each and every component does and how to make the most of it. A lot of tutorials just show you how to build x, usually in one way. But for making your own UI, you really need to understand what makes all the different parts tick and how they slot together for different effects. There is also one chapter al about the new UnityEvent system (which I’ve not seen good examples for anywhere) that is very code heavy. It even discusses how to work with the Open source UI code.

The one thing the book does not do, is to build UI recipes (bespoke UI layouts) as anyone can show that. Plus I’ll be following up with bonus content with some of my own on my blog.

If your goal is just to replicate what others have done, then the video tutorials I’ve seen (and a fair few I highly rate) will do the job. If you want to learn what goes in to building the UI so you understand how it works and how to make the most of it, then my book will take you much further. Everyone is different and everyone learns in different ways, so the choice is yours 😀

I’m frequently on the UI forums helping others out with their UI queries and a lot of the questions could have been avoided with the knowledge I impart 😛

As ever this journey will likely never end and I’ll continue to help developers as much as I have ever done in the past. I hope you will join me on this wild ride!

About TextMeshPro

A fantastic text management system that helps to bridge the gaps and the limitations in Unity’s aging text rendering system. Unity themselves have noted on several occasions they want to rip out the text system and replace it with something better, until that happens, the best asset to help with text generation from within Unity (not just getting an artist to build lots of text assets) is TextMeshPro.

TextMeshPro has been around for quite a while now and has run with the leaders to get it updated for the new UI system but the author didn’t stop there. TextMeshPro has gone far and beyond its humble text rendering beginnings to add such features as improved alignment/indentation and rich text support, even adding vertex animation for the generated text! (Just check out http://bit.ly/TextMeshProAnimation)

About GUI Generator

Building clean and efficient UIs in Unity have always been a strain (just look at this chapter!), this is where the GUI Generator comes in, starting with the old GUI, then adapting to also handle NGUI and now the new Unity UI system. It’s a quick and advanced tool to clean up the look and feel of your UI (no, it doesn’t build your UI for you, it styles it!).

It also has many built-in effects you can add to your UI to make it stunning. Like TextMeshPro, the author has been working hard through the beta to get this great tool updated to handle the new UI elements and skin them to great effect.